natsukashii (adj.) of some small thing that brings you suddenly back to fond memories, not with a wistful longing for what is past but with an appreciation of the good times.

She awoke long before dawn and lay exhausted and wakeful, with her eyes closed, thinking of the countless years she had dreamed of still living. Sometime around sunrise, there was a stirring in the room next door, quiet and shuffling, and then the unmistakeable hammer-and-relief of Matthias at his blind typewriter. This sound continued, rather feverishly, without abate; within itself, that was a comfort: even as they drew to the close, some things in this world were still familiar. Avrova Vovk could take solace in that much.

Decebal Nicolescu had long ago lost any instinct for asking permission to enter a room; around noon, he merely pushed open the door and sat heavily on the end of her bed, throwing himself backwards with a sigh. In the wan light of the morning, there was a grainy texture to his skin, a particulate coarseness that suggested he might dissolve into the air if he wasn't careful. He said, "I though you might appreciate being woken."

One of Avrova's arms hung over the bed; her knuckles gently grazed the wooden floorboards. "I might."

This room was unfamiliar to her; they did not have spaces they could truly call their own, not since they had been initiated and left the barracks they had called home for so many years. They eked out an existence wherever the military indicated there might be space for them - Matthias had always made an art of sleeping no matter where they found themselves; Klaara had long ago made a habit of spending her nights in the infirmary, her wounds slowly patching over with gravel and stone. They no longer woke to one another's grousing as they stumbled around preparing for inspection; they no longer dined in the mess, comparing aches and wounds from whatever ordeals Commandant Sauer had devised that day; they no longer spent their evenings quietly playing cards on the floor of their dormitory. Theirs was now a far more solitary life; Avrova had gone many months without seeing her fellow Warriors, but she knew that hers had not been the most eremetic existence: Jaga had lived as a monster for years.

But at the end, it always came back to this, and Avrova had dared to dream that it always would – Decebal laying back on the end of her bed, and the pounding of Matthias' typewriter next door. Klaara had compared them once to trees – no matter how tall they grew, their roots would always be intertwined with each other's.

"So this is it," Decebal said ruefully. "Retirement."

It was the end of the road. Avrova readied slowly for the day; the window of this room overlooked the grassiest part of the training camp, where the cadets held muster every morning. Perhaps it had once been an instructor's office; the floorboards were warped from many years of tread, boot-shod. To the rhythm of Matthias' typing, Avrova gingerly pulled on her regulation shirt. The rough-spun cotton of the collar reminded her of the cadet uniform of their childhood. She found her boots left neatly by the bed, the toes more scuffed than Commandant Sauer would ever have countenanced on inspection. Next door, there was a stutter in Matthias' typing, like a heart murmur, as though he had lost his thread of thought, and then, as Decebal and Avrova left the room, it resumed once more with a passion.

The day was bright; it seemed all the brighter for the end of the war. The air was crisp and cool. The morning sun seemed like so much liquid silver, painting the stone steps of the officer's hall in argent light and spinning a spiderweb silhouette of the Warrior who stood there. Jaga Szymański had one scarred arm folded awkwardly around a wooden crutch, its handle worn and smoothed by long hours of use. As she saw Decebal and Avrova approach, she smiled. Her teeth were too sharp, her mouth too wide, her eyes too large, for her to fully shake off all traces of the beast she had been only hours earlier. In this light, it even looked like some of her hair might still be clumped in the shape of feathers. But her voice was human – and sweet – as she said, "we were taking bets on whether you'd ever wake up."

Decebal gestured to her crutch. His voice was streaked with mirth as he said, "re-adjusting to life on two legs?" He had lost an arm at some point in the night; one sleeve of his canvas jacket hung empty, the shoulder beneath bandaged thoroughly in an attempt to hold him together before initiation could take place. They were crumbling, very slowly, to pieces, before one another's eyes.

"Existence tethered to the ground," Jaga replied. She sounded like her tongue was a foreign object, heavy in her mouth; it made her voice a little thicker, less fluid. It had been many, many months since she had assumed her human form; the others had assumed she never would again. That was how the Kur Moon usually met its end – devolving into nothing more than a senseless beast in search of fresh flesh. So it had been for Jaga's cousin, Dagmara Szymański; so it would be for the next poor soul who inherited the curse. But here Jaga stood before them, human – mostly human – partly human. She must have decided to die alongside her brothers. "So far from the sky. What a miserable prospect."

"Wow," Avrova murmured flatly. "I never knew how bad we had it."

They were slow as they moved down the steps, as much for Decebal's sake as for Jaga's. Avrova could feel the eyes of the other infantry hot upon them. The heroes of the New Asian war, moving like cripples as curses festered in their bones like canker. That evening, when night fell and the end of the war was at last declared, there would be celebrations, and festivals, and dancing in the streets. They could take solace in that, Avrova thought, in bringing some small amount of joy into a world that had taken so much from them. Some paltry bit of good had come of their suffering.

That, at least, was a comfort.

It was strange to have Decebal walk with them again; for so long he had chosen to drift on the air as only a Chariot could, reforming his body at will. When that had begun to falter, the other Warriors had been hasty to cover for him, as they had covered for all the others when their curses first wrought blight – as Klaara had spent many long hours transcribing Matthias' increasingly murky prophecies to obsfucate his increasing mania from their commanding officers, as Jaga had bandaged Arsen's wounds whenever they abruptly reopened over breakfast and dinner, as Decebal and Esteban had surreptitiously carried Voski to the river on those nights they thought she might burn up in her sleep and take them all with her.

There was no hiding it anymore, and Avrova thought that there was a quiet kind of peace in that fact.

They were not stopped as they moved about the base; where would they go? Who would stop them? They were xrafstars. There could be no good answer to either question.

On the other side of the fence, the gold-fretted city was quiet in the early hours of the day, its cobbles cool. Beyond the spires of Opona, the mountains rose, streaked with heather and slate. The afterglow of the dawn clung to the soft peaks in the west, and the breeze that was drawn into the valley was rising gently, day-heated. They had spent so many long weeks in those mountains during the winter, honing their survival skills on the mountains. It had been a harsh regime; Avrova had sometimes felt the spectre of death circling them, like a great vulture hidden behind the clouds. One always felt grateful for usual misery after a sejourn in that wilderness.

They traced an old path along the fence, towards the grounds where the new generation of Warriors were being trained; the way was familiar, worn into place by so many years of cadet footfall. They met only a small army truck packed with conscripts on the flat bed, returning from the front. There were some whoops as they saw Decebal the saboteur, which as gratifying as it was surprising – the majority of infantry, like their commanders, feared and mistrusted them for their Kur ancestry. Avrova had spent her childhood thinking that she couldn't blame them for their suspicion; she had outgrown that belief long ago. Of course she could blame them.

And then there it was, muffled by the tall buildings on either side: the unmistakeably harsh barking of Commandant Sauer. They were drawing closer to the garrison now. On the other side of the fence, the Warrior cadets were completing a forced march, loaded down by a soldier's full kit. Avrova knew by now that Sauer tended to secretly over-weight the packs; at this point, they were probably carrying thirty or forty kilograms apiece, and the commandant rarely allowed anything slower than a jog. Avrova remembered retching on her first dozen of these gruelling exercises; it had gotten easier over time, but only barely.

Several of these Warrior candidates were clearly still struggling, for they ranged over a degree of distance that suggested a faster start for some. It would have been impossible to deny the traces of nostalgia in Decebal's eyes as he watched them.

"Death marches," he said. His voice was tinged with fondness. "I don't miss them."

"They weren't so bad," Jaga said mildly. She leaned briefly on her crutch, watching the recruits. One of her eyes was completely black, her sclera stained dark with pooled-up blood; she had burst several blood vessels in the other, so that her dark brown eyes seemed wine-streaked. "It was nice to have some time to yourself. Get some space to think."

Decebal shot her a look that made it clear he believed her insane. There was a glitter to his skin, a granularity, like pieces of him were flaking away as specks of gold and bronze.

As they continued along their path, they could hear the movement of the cadets, shielded from the Warriors by the tall, thin wall that demarcated Kur and Irij training grounds. There was someone with heavily laboured breathing, someone limping heavily, someone stumbling over themselves on the path as it curved sharply into the finish – a slight slope upwards, and then back down into the valley for another lap around the garrison. They still had a long path ahead of them, then.

"Here." Clearly believing themselves out of earshot, the tallest cadet had slowed to match the pace of one of the smallest. Now he paused – it sounded like he was hauling most of her pack onto his shoulders, atop his own. "You look like you're about to collapse."

"Pekka." The girl's voice was wavering. By the sound of it, she could not have been much older than Jaga had been upon taking her curse, with an accent that suggested a childhood in Opona. "If they find out –"

"Make sure that doesn't happen."

The other cadet was risking his position by helping her. Cheating on an assessment could earn you a demerit, if you were lucky; if you were unlucky, you could slide several spots down the ranking – even fall out of the top eleven. Or maybe, Avrova thought, that should be the other way around. To be denied a curse could hardly be considered misfortune.

"Don't let me down, Zula. Get back before the cut-off."

Their footsteps receded, more even now, and steadier. Jaga was clearly thinking the same thing as the others; she had another smile on that wide mouth of hers as the three Warriors circled the wall and came down to the square. The commandant was there, as they had expected, waiting to issue sharp-tongued correctives to the candidates on their return. He was older than Avrova remembered him being, greyer at the temples, but he still had that straight-backed stature that distinguished a man for whom the army was a clear lifeline.

"Come to see your replacements?" His voice was the same as well, low and gruff and hoarse, but Konrad Sauer didn't seem totally displeased to see them. He had been sitting on the steps to the mess hall; as he saw them approached, he stood slowly, with some difficulty. "Morbid, even for you."

Decebal shook his head. "We were on our way to the Chancellery."

Commandant Sauer nodded. "They should be generous to the warriors who brought down New Asia." It was some small bit of incentive for those who had survived this long as Warriors, and who now had to look their death square in the eye: a private audience with the chancellor. Avrova's predecessor had not lived that long. Matthias' predecessor had secured a pardon for his imprisoned father.

Jaga's predecessor had asked that her cousin share her curse. Avrova knew that Jaga intended to ask the same for her little sister.

Sauer added, "You have done well. I hope someone has told you that already."

What was he thinking when he looked at them? Did he see any traces of the children they had been? Jaga was only a few years older than the current candidates; she had spent nearly half of her life under the thrall of her curse. Did he regret training them for this fate?

Avrova had not hoped to find those answers in his eyes, but as he met her gaze levelly, she could not help but note the lack of any great truth buried within. She had been the last ranked in her class – one place lower, and she would never have inherited the Lovers. She would never have lost all that she had. She would not be standing here now feeling her heart slowly calcify in her chest. Sauer was Kur as well, as much Schreave as any of them were, but he had escaped the clawed grip of the Warrior Programme in his youth. Was that why he had dedicated his life to training the cadets? Some paltry grasp at redemption for his good fortune?

But Avrova did not ask those questions that day, and Sauer did not answer. As the first few cadets began to trickle in through the gates and dump their packs, looking exhausted, he just shook the Warriors' hands firmly, and told them they had nothing to worry about.

That was true. There was a kind of peace in that. Nothing to worry about anymore.

Kinga Szymański had been the second through the gate, though barely. Tall, broad Pekka Hämäläinen had been at her heels right until the end, when he had made a sudden sprint to beat her to the boundary line. They were several lengths ahead of the third and fourth arrivals - Pekka had turned to wait for the others, while Kinga raised an arm in greeting when she spotted the Warriors watching.

Jaga returned the gesture, and moved slowly away from her old instructor as the candidate made her way over. The Kur Moon was moving more easily now, but Decebal readied to catch her in case her legs buckled, extending his remaining arm in a silent watchfulness. "Hey, short guy."

Kinga smiled briefly. She was only an inch shorter than Jaga, with much stronger features, handsome next to her delicate sister, but the sisters shared the same brown skin and thick dark hair. They had probably looked very similar, until the changes of the curse had taken over Jaga. "Hey. I wasn't expecting to see you again."

Jaga laughed lightly and set an affectionate hand on Kinga's shoulder. "Sorry to disappoint."

"Holding up okay? How are the ranks looking?" Decebal asked. His gaze was roving over the candidates as they came trailing back into the square. "There's still a lot of you..."

"Fifteen, I think." Kinga was relaxed. "Final assessment tomorrow. Nothing concrete until then."

"Yeah," Avrova said. Her voice was like ice snapping. "But if you know, you know."

There was no fear of Kinga Szymański falling out of the top eleven. It was as guaranteed for her as it had been for Jaga, and for Dagmara before her. And to her credit, Kinga did not bother with false humility; she just nodded and said, "I know." She looked at her sister. "I know."

Coming up behind her, Pekka said, "how are you guys feeling?"

"It doesn't matter." Jaga shook her head ruefully. "We should be asking you that instead."

"This has been ten years in the making. There shouldn't be any surprises – for anyone."

Pekka Hämäläinen was the oldest member of this generation, just three years younger than Jaga. Avrova knew that the Irij brass had briefly considered drafting him into their generation at the last minute, when Oxana had buckled under the weight of the Death Curse. It was good that they hadn't, even if it had only delayed the inevitable – surprisingly, given the cut-throat environment of the Warriors Programme, the man had the undying respect of his comrades; even more surprisingly, he seemed to deserve it. He was an imposing presence, with a habitually serious expression and blonde hair kept short according to the military standard. Avrova found herself wondering, as she often did, which curse would befall him. Where would he find himself ten years hence – blind and blighted, like Matthias? Burned up by the heart out, like Voski? Rotten and decomposed alive, like Alajos?

Should they warn him?

"You should be proud of yourselves," Decebal was saying. "Making it to the end in such high positions – it's not nothing."

"Don't push yourselves too hard," Jaga agreed. "There's no point burning out now."

"Pekka!" One of the other candidates was calling them back – the short girl with the kind dark eyes. Inanna Nirari, Avrova thought, smarter than people gave her credit for but lacking any semblance of a Warrior's constitution. "Muster!"

Pekka and Kinga exchanged looks. It had been most unlike Commandant Sauer to allow them even this much time with their upperclassmen; they seemed unwilling to overplay their hand. "Will we see you guys again?"

Avrova nodded, but it was Decebal who spoke. "All surviving Warriors will be at your initiation."

All surviving, Avrova thought. A lot could change between now and then.

"Until then," Jaga said, "we'll be enjoying our retirement."

Her sister chuckled. When she smiled, Kinga looked so much like a young Jaga that it almost hurt to look at her. "Make good choices."

The young candidates retreated; apparently undeterred by the miles that lay behind them, Pekka jogged to Inanna's side. Kinga took up her position near the back of the group as they assembled for their post-march inspection. Azula, the small New Asian girl who had so struggled with her pack on the run, was already being subjected to a tirade from Sauer about her poor performance, and clearly straining to avoid visibly reacting to her instructor's imposing presence. The others were maintaining total discipline, their faces unmoving even as their legs buckled beneath them.

Jaga tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. "It feels like only yesterday," she said wryly, "doesn't it?"

Avrova had to agree. Like the generations of leaves, the lives of mortal men - now the wind scattered the old leaves across the earth, now the living timber burst with the new buds, now spring hovered on the horizon.

And so with man: as one generation came to life, another must die away.